Wide band high-efficiency power amplifier design

This paper presents a hybrid (passive & active) power amplifier concept for a wideband high drain efficiency power amplifier design. The proposed design integrates for the first time a dual-band PA with an active second harmonic injection to achieve high efficiency across a continuous wideband frequency range of two octaves. The design utilizes a resistively loaded class B at the lower frequencies and a class J mode of operation at the upper frequency band. To maintain high efficiency during the transition between the two PA modes an active second harmonic injection at the output of the main transistor is employed through an addition of an auxiliary low power amplifier. To demonstrate the validity of the novel concept a demonstrator is realized around a 10 W GaN transistor with an average efficiency of 63% across 0.6-2.4 GHz at only modest gain compression of 1dB.